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Historically, if you wanted more leads from your website, you would hire a consultant or an agency to help make your website “better.” You would design a more attractive website, write marketing copy that was more compelling or work on your SEO to try to increase the number of visitors to your site. All of these are valid approaches to improving website performance, however, there are problems with this approach. What is a “better” design and who is it more attractive to? Have you come across websites that you loved but your spouse or parter hated? How about marketing copy that turned you off but got a friend or associate so excited, they couldn’t stop talking about the product or service?
The problem with “better,” is that it’s relative.
Measurable results are the alternative because by quantifying your results, you can see with clarity whether a particular approach is moving you closer to your business goals. So, what’s important to measure in the context of online marketing or lead generation? That depends on your business goals, however, if one of them is to obtain more customers, here are some typical factors.
Unique Visitors is the number of unique individuals that came to your website in a given period like a week or month. Calls to Action are requests for the visitor to do something, like call your or fill out a contact form or request-for-quote form. Conversion rate is the percentage of unique visitors who take a particular action. For example, the conversion rate for your contact form would be the number of people who filled out the form divided by the total number of unique visitors. If you had 100 unique visitors and received 10 contact form submissions, your conversion rate would be 10%. Your Acquisition Cost is the total cost that you spend to acquire a customer, in this case through your website. Say you run a Google adwords campaign and spend about $1 per click for those 100 unique visitors. Next, assume that it takes 10 leads (contact form submissions) for you to get a single customer. That means your acquisition cost for a customer is $100.
Conversion rate is a measure of how effective your website is at turning visitors into prospects. If you increase your conversion rate, your site is performing measurably better than it was before. With a handle on your conversion rates, you can begin to make changes to your site and see if those changes improve your conversion rate or not. This is basic testing and, to speed up the process, you can use A/B testing where you test a single change to your website against the status quo. For example, you could A/B test a new primary image for your site’s slide show. A/B testing is straightforward - your website developer implements software that dynamically switches your site’s main slideshow image between the two options you are testing. One-half of the time, a visitor will see image A and one-half of the time a visitor will see image B. At the end of some period, you compare your conversion rates for visitors who saw image A with those who were given image B. In this way, you can clearly determine whether the new image made a difference in the effectiveness of your website’s lead generation.
How do you decide what to test and how much to test? This is where experience, knowledge and a good grasp of your customer base comes in. You have to start somewhere, so you start by making changes that you think will make your site “better.” The difference is that you don’t assume these changes are better, you test them to prove it. In some cases your educated guesses will turn out to be beneficial. In a surprising amount of instances, they won’t. Once you get the hang of A/B testing, you quickly realize that you can literally test EVERY SINGLE change you might want to make. It can become easy to start doubting yourself and want to run tests on everything. This is impractical. Instead, start by testing a few large and noticeable changes, like your headline or hero image. Later, once you believe you have found the best version of those that you can create, begin to test smaller changes.
Optimizing your conversion rate is an important first step before beginning a search engine optimization or pay-per-click campaign designed to drive more traffic to your site. If you spend a lot of money driving traffic to a poorly optimized site, your acquisition cost for a customer increases, sometimes dramatically. So, to get the most bang for your marketing buck, start with A/B testing and optimize your conversion rates. Then move on to strategies that will drive more traffic to your site.

The graphic design, or look and feel, is the first impression every visitor gets from a website. It’s a critical component in establishing credibility and inspiring people to stick around. Poorly or generically designed websites have higher bounce rates than professionally designed ones. (more…)

Would you like to grow your FaceBook likes? Do you want more Twitter followers? Regardless of the social network you are targeting, these principles will help you grow awareness and increase traffic to your website and business.

Add Value

The number one principle is to always add value. Whether you are writing a blog post, an email newsletter, a tweet or a FaceBook post, always try to say something that would be of value to your target reader. There are a variety of ways to create value. You can provide inform people regarding current events or happenings in your industry. You can educate them about your category of product or service. Or you can provide entertainment (this is a tricky one, of course, because not everyone finds the same things funny). (more…)

There is an array of SEO tools out there, many of which cost money and may be complicated to use. However, one of the best tools available for analyzing your traffic and SEO performance is free and easy to use (at least at a basic level!) - Google Analytics. If you don't know what Google Analytics is, it's a tool to keep track of your website's data; who's visiting your site, from where, how they got there, what your most popular keywords are, which of your pages are most popular, etc. And among all the thousands of SEO tips you may come across, one of the most important is using a tool like Google Analytics to track everything you need to be aware of and improve on for increased traffic and conversions. So I'm going to walk you through a short Google Analytics tutorial, along with some Analytics SEO tips and how to get the most out of this tool. (more…)

Where does your business fit in the overall scheme of your marketplace? Are you the market leader? Are you the low cost leader? Do you have the most premium offering? These are just a few of the ways you can describe your market positioning. Good market positioning insures that you are differentiated sufficiently within your market and therefore have a strong platform from which to attract customers. (more…)

You may have heard that it is beneficial for your website if it has a blog, and you probably know several companies who have a blog on their website. But have you ever wondered what the point of a blog is and whether you should set one up on your site? There are quite a few reasons why your site could benefit from a blog, and the answer is yes, you should have one. Here's why: (more…)

When most small business owners think about marketing their business, a punch list of potential marketing activities usually comes to mind. “I need to update the web site, get a FaceBook page and maybe I should try advertising on the side of buses,” they think to themselves. This is the wrong approach to marketing. Here’s why… (more…)

The saying “he could sell ice cubes to Eskimos” is usually said with one part envy and one part disdain. The ability to sell, whether it be your services, your company’s products or an idea is an important skill and people that do it well are often very successful. It’s one of the most essential skills of an entrepreneur but I believe it’s a skill that everyone could benefit from improving. That’s because on the most basic level, “selling” is just enrolling someone in a course of action that you would like them to take. This applies as much to convincing your family or friends to go to Cancun for a vacation as it does to convincing a prospect that they should buy from you. (more…)

Mobile web usage is increasing rapidly. As of this writing, nearly 30% of the 4+ billion mobile phones are smart phones. By 2014, it’s predicted that mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop Internet usage. That’s a lot of users that you don’t want to miss out on. However, most smart phones will pull up your regular website, so why would you need a mobile website?

For many businesses, the answer is that you don’t. For now. However, if you have a business that people are likely to search for from their phone, then there are some compelling reasons. For example, if you are a restaurant, retail store or provide a service that might be needed in an emergency such as a plumber or locksmith you need a mobile website now. Here’s why...

Improving conversions on a non-ecommerce site should lead to more prospects which might lead to more customers. However, improving conversion rates on an ecommerce site means more money DIRECTLY in your pocket. These simple tips will help almost any ecommerce site improve sales. (more…)

New Directions In Computing provides web design, web development,web hosting and SEOweb marketing to companies in Santa Barbara,Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo. We offer professional web site design, graphic design and logo design as well as web marketing, including social networking, email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). We are experts in a number of high quality web applications including Joomla, WordPress, x-cart and Moodle. We develop custom web applications in a variety of technologies such as PHP, ASP, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django and Java. We also develop mobile web sites and mobile apps for iPhone and Android.